Reading as a mirror

Written on August 12th, 2012 ; with a PS added today, March 14th, 2026

Continued from Art is More than Life:

I discover myself more in reading than writing. I don’t mean just reading the written word, but maybe studying the false emotions of an actor, reflected in his face*, for they are the mirror to feelings I can never directly acknowledge in myself, the distorting mirror that shows me how I really look. When I sit at my desk trying to tell it how it is, words flee. Only when I look elsewhere, sniff the open air, read the book of Nature, catch the phrase someone utters, aloud or in a book, do I collect clues to define my true state. Like Dirk Gently, the holistic detective, I can’t help believing in the interconnectedness of all things.

And the more I explore through reading and writing, the more fractured I find myself to be, the more handicapped, the more Pessoan, the more human. Pessoa is the Portuguese for person. Let him have the last word here, possibly to shed light on the mind of Nathaniel Ayers:

Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others—not even the hatred of others, since hatred is at least more intermittent than affection … But hatred as well as love is oppressive; both seek to pursue us, won’t leave us alone.
. . .
Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been realized, belongs to the world and to everyone. If I were to realize a dream I’d be jealous, for it would have betrayed me by allowing itself to be realized…. We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying “Look at me move.”

From The Book of Disquiet, translated by Richard Zenith, fragment 348.

*PS on Saturday March 14th 2026: my beloved watches one or two episodes of Everwood each afternoon. I sit in the front room with our afternoon teas on trays not watching it. I can read, write, listen to music on headphones, then fall asleep on the sofa.

The only plot I can see is a cast of the same actors and crew teaming up daily enacting endless scripts across five years